A Darkling Plain (55 page)

on the way south for fuel and gas. When I dropped in to the bank there, I found that--guess what?--I'm rich! I had quite forgotten the five thousand that Wolf Kobold had paid us for his trip to London, but there it all was, still safe in the
Jenny Haniver
's account. I felt a little bit guilty about keeping it, but I suppose we earned it fairly; after all, we took Wolf to London as he asked, and it's no fault of ours he tried to eat it. Anyway, I have spent some of the money already, on an airship of my own, and she is being overhauled at Zagwa harbor as I write. She's a converted Achebe
1000, and we plan to call her Jenny Haniver II.
So when we come home, we shall be traders in our own right; Ngoni & Natsworthy of New London, purveyors of Mag-Lev furniture to the gentry.... Trade is opening up again with the east now that the Green Storm has gone and the new League has made peace with the cities. We may even cross the ocean to America, and see my old friends and my old home at Anchorage-in-Vineland, and tell them about everything that's happened. And of course we shall often come to Zagwa.

Theo had a letter back from the Widow Naga, which was very nice of her when you consider that she's got the whole of the new Anti-Traction League to run, and half the mountain kingdoms still knee-deep in ash. She told him that Mum and Mr. Grike reached Batmunkh Gompa with her on the evening before Zhan Shan got zapped, and they rescued Daddy and flew off in the
Jenny Haniver.
She doesn't seem to know where they went, or why, but the burned-out wreck of a ship with Jeunet-Carot pods was found later at a valley in the Erdene Shan. She says that, if I want to, I could go there, and pay my respects in the place where they died.

Dad and Mum are dead, but even if that is the
Jenny
's wreck at Erdene Shan, that's not where they are. They've gone. Nobody knows where, and no one ever will. But I like to think that they've taken the bird roads, west of the sun, beyond the moon, flying off together into wild skies and wonderful adventures. Sometimes, without quite meaning to, I find myself looking up, as if there's still a part of me that expects to see the
Jenny Haniver
come out from behind a cloud or the shoulder of a mountain, bringing them home....

***

GRIKE HAD ARRIVED TOO late. He ran like a ghost through the mountains, and came to Erdene Tezh just before dawn, when the sky above the lake was scratched with the trails of shooting stars.

The house was a ruin by then; gray ash; charred beams; a few trickles of white smoke still drifting across the garden. In a chamber full of carbonized machinery he found the remains of the Stalker Fang, and knelt beside her. The gimcrack Engineer-built part of her brain had stopped working, but he sensed faint electrical flutterings fading in the other, older part. He unplugged one of the cords from his skull and fitted it into a port on hers. Her memories whispered to him, and his mind drank them.

The sun rose. Grike went back out into the garden, and

in the gathering light he saw Tom and Hester waiting for him by the fountain. He had not noticed them in the dark, for they were as cold as the stones they lay upon.

Grike went down on his knees beside them and gently drew out the knife that Hester had driven through her own heart. At first he thought that if he were quick, he could still carry her to Batmunkh Gompa and make Oenone Zero Resurrect her. But when he started to lift her, he found that she had clutched Tom's hand as she died, and she was still clinging tightly to it.

If Stalkers could cry, he would have cried then, for he knew all at once that this was the right end for her, and that she would not want him to take her from this quiet valley, or from the Once-Born she had loved.

So he lifted them together, and carried them away from the house. As he crossed the causeway, the slack weight of their bodies shook a faint memory loose in him. He checked to see if it was one of those he had just absorbed from Anna Fang, but it was his own. Long ago, before he was a Stalker, he had had children, and when they were sleepy and he had carried them to their beds, they had lain just as limp and heavy in his arms as Tom and Hester lay now.

The memory was a fragment, a gift, a down payment on that knowledge of his past that Oenone Zero had promised would come to him when he died. But that would not be for a long time. He had been made to last.

He found a place at the head of the valley where a river tumbled down in white cataracts past a rocky outcrop; where a stunted oak tree grew. It reminded him of things Hester

had told him about the lost island of her childhood. There he laid her down with Tom, side by side, still holding hands, their faces almost touching. Unsheathing his claws for the last time, he cut away their soggy clothes, the belts and boots they would no longer need. There was a shallow cave at the foot of the rocks nearby, and he went and sat down in it, watching and waiting, wondering what he would find to do in a world that no longer held Hester.

That evening airships buzzed down to land at the ruin on the lake. After a while they went away again.

Days flew over the valley of Erdene Tezh. In the fitful sunlight Tom and Hester began to swell and darken beneath their shroud of flies. Worms and beetles fed on them, and birds flew down to take their eyes and tongues. Soon their smell attracted small mammals that had been going hungry in that cheerless summer.

Grike did not move. He shut down his systems one by one until only his eyes and his mind were awake. He watched the graceful architecture of Tom and Hester's skeletons emerge, their bare skulls leaning together like two eggs in a nest of wet hair. Winter heaped snow over them; the rains of spring washed them clean. Next summer's grass grew thick and green beneath them, and an oak sapling sprouted in the white basket of Hester's ribs.

Grike watched it all while the years fell past him, green and white, green and white. The small bones of their hands and feet scattered into the grass like dice; larger ones were tumbled and gnawed by foxes; they turned gray and crumbly, and it became hard to tell whose had been whose.

The oak sapling grew into a tree; spread out a canopy that blushed green in summer and threw dancing shadows over Grike; shed acorns that became new saplings; grew old, trailed beards of lichen; died and fell and rotted, giving up its goodness to the roots of younger trees that were spreading down the hillside to the lake.

Grike sank deeper into his fugue. Stars blurred over him; seasons blinked at him. The trees became a wood. Bare branches breathed in, exhaled green leaves, turned golden, bare, breathed in.

At last a human figure began to flash in front of him, stooping again and again to place something around his neck. With a deep effort he began to rouse himself; the flicker of day and night becoming less frantic as the whirl of seasons and centuries slowed.

A summer morning. Green light shining through the leaves of an ancient oak wood. Garlands of flowers decked Grike's torso, and the remnants of older garlands lay dried and crumbling in his mossy lap. His shoulders were shaggy with ferns. A bird had nested in the crook of his arm. Of Tom and Hester nothing remained but a little dust blowing between the gnarled roots of the trees.

Goats were moving through the wood. The bells on their necks chimed softly. A small Once-Born boy came and stood looking at Grike, and was joined by a girl, still smaller. They had ocher skin, brown eyes, dusty black hair.

"HELLO," said Grike. His voice was rustier and more screechy than ever. The boy fled, but the girl stayed, speaking

to him in a language that he did not know. After a while she went and picked some small blue flowers among the oak trees and made a crown for him. Her brother came back, cautious, wide-eyed. The little girl brought some fat and rubbed it into Grike's joints. He moved. He stood up. Gravel and owl pellets cascaded off him; he shook himself free of cobwebs and birds' nests and moss.

The girl took his hand, and her brother led them down the valley amid a bleating, chiming crowd of goats. They stopped at a village, where adult Once-Born came to stare at Grike and poke him with sticks and the handles of simple farm tools. Listening to their excited chatter, he started to decipher their language. They'd thought him nothing but an old statue, sitting there in his cave. They had hung flowers about his neck for luck each summer when they brought their goats up to the high pastures. They had been doing it since their mothers' mothers' time.

Down a track to a paved road, riding on a cart now, the children beside him. The sun was redder than Grike recalled, the air clearer, the mountain climate kinder. A town lay cupped in a wooded vale. Grike wondered if his new friends realized that its ancient metal walls were made from the tracks of a mobile city, and that some of its round, rust-brown watchtowers had once been wheels. They seemed simple people, and he imagined that their society had no machines at all, but as they brought him through the town gates, he saw delicate airborne ships of wood and glass rising like dragonflies from tall stone mooring towers. Silvery disks, like misty mirrors, swiveled and pivoted on their undersides,

and the air beneath them rippled like a heat haze.

They took him to a meeting place, a big hall in the city's heart. People crowded around him to ask questions. What kind of being was he? How long had he been asleep? Was he one of the machine men out of the old stories?

Grike had no answers. He asked questions of his own. He asked if there were any places in the world where cities still moved and hunted and ate one another. The Once-Born laughed. Of course there weren't; cities only moved in fairy tales; who would want to live in a moving city? It was a mad ideal

"What are you
for?"
asked one boy at last, pushing to the front of the crowd. Grike looked down at him. He pondered awhile, thinking of something Dr. Popjoy had told Anna.

"I AM A REMEMBERING MACHINE," he said.

"What do you remember?"

"I REMEMBER THE AGE OF THE TRACTION CITIES. I REMEMBER LONDON AND ARKANGEL; THADDEUS VALENTINE AND ANNA FANG. I REMEMBER HESTER AND TOM."

His listeners looked blank. Someone said, "Who were they?"

"THEY LIVED LONG AGO. IT SEEMS ONLY YESTERDAY TO ME."

The little girl who'd found Grike looked up at him and said, "Tell us!" Around her, people smiled and nodded, settling down cross-legged, waiting to see what stories he had brought for them out of the lost past. They liked stories. Grike felt, for a moment, almost afraid. He didn't know how to begin.

He sat down on the chair they brought for him. He took the little girl on his lap. He watched dust motes dancing in

the ancient sunlight that poured like honey through the hall's long windows. And then he turned his face toward the expectant faces of the Once-Borns, and began.

"IT WAS A DARK, BLUSTERY DAY IN SPRING," he said, "AND THE CITY OF LONDON WAS CHASING A SMALL MINING TOWN ACROSS THE DRIED-UP BED OF THE OLD NORTH SEA...."